This paper described elements of how I today approach the social work classroom as an educator, drawing on my previous therapy work with men who perpetrate abuse and conceptualizing ‘social work students’ as potential/future perpetrators of the injustices that many of them seek to address by entering the field of social work. My own journey has come from, among other things, being in community with psychiatric survivors/service users, having worked in an institution where I myself physically restrained and confined disabled Aboriginal children, and having worked with men who perpetrate abuse. In my work with abuse perpetrators, I found that the ways that they discussed their own use of violence and control resonated with what I encountered as a helping professional as justifications for the use of violence and control in that context. I have developed and taught two Social Work courses out of these concerns – one focusing on ‘history’ and one on ‘ethics.’ Both courses share, to differing degrees, a dual focus: on the one hand, I centre accounts of those who have been adversely affected by ‘the helping professions’ and of those who have been excluded from membership in ‘the helping professions’ through their historical development; on the other hand, I invite students to articulate their own ‘local knowledges’ about oppression, power, and so on, through reflecting on their own lives and experiences. In this paper, I shared the syllabus of the history course and discuss my rationale for the course materials – including First Nations, African-descent, prison abolitionist, Mad movement, Disability Studies, Queer, and anti-racist/anti-colonial feminist analyses. I also described a pedagogical tool I used in the ethics course, in which each student was interviewed about a time in her life when she herself perpetrated an ethical transgression relating to systemic oppression.